Pandora Expands Local Sales Clout With Partners

Pandora has announced a reseller program that enables companies with local sales teams to sell Pandora ads as part of their portfolio. This is a way that the company can expand beyond the top tier markets where they have their own sellers, to smaller markets. Apparently it’s been in place for a few months now – and it’s working – the local advertising strategy has resulted in more than 800 local advertising campaigns scheduled to run this year, a 100 percent increase from just two months ago.

This year, Pandora has been placing lots of emphasis on expanding its ability to sell ads market by market – a strategy previously considered the turf of local broadcast stations. They hiredEdison Research to parse data and create local market comparisons to Arbitron data subscribed to by local radio stations, and more recently contracted with Triton for market by market ratings.

With 70% of their massive audience on mobile devices, Pandora can offer local market media companies a lot of extra clout in reaching mobile customers. Mobile impressions are probably more valuable as location based ads, targeting listeners who are close to an advertiser location. A local sales team can drill down to that level and find advertisers suitable for those impressions.

Pandora Chief Revenue Officer John Trimble said, “Consumers are increasingly mobile, and advertisers want to be where their consumers are. We have a clear advantage, both in our scale of more than 100 million people accessing Pandora on mobile, and our unique ability to help advertisers reach targeted audiences through both visual and audio ad formats.”